Sunday miscellany

My only thought about the Amy Bishop thing is that I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Academics are weird, and tenure denial can be awful. The kind of focus needed to make it on to the tenure track can produce a kind of tunnel vision that blinds one to other parts of life, and, in that mindset, the failure of one’s central project can seem like the kind of blow that might as well be life-ending. (No, I never thought about shooting anyone, though I did contemplate, without much endorsement, taking an enormous crap on a colleague’s desk.)

A friend who teaches at UA-H knew Bishop a bit and reports that she was very weird before this, too. I can’t imagine what departmental life will be like going forward.

Glenn Reynolds has a post on this which contains the following update:

UPDATE: From Ratemyprofessors.com: “This class was great. Bishop makes the class interesting by talking about her research and her friends research. That speaker she had for class was hard to understand but smart. She expects alot and you need to come to every class and study. She is hot but she tries to hide it.And she is a socalist but she only talks about it after class.”

Reader George Berryman writes: “I’m guessing the ’she’s a socialist’ part won’t get talked about much in the MSM. But if she had been a conservative it’d lead every evening news cast for two months.”

In other adventures in loathsomeness, Ta-Nehisi Coates gets some interesting comments.

I am currently hanging in effigy a printed off picture of you, Tee-hee-hee, over my computer with the words ‘Lynch Coates’ written on the photo. Discern that.

The odd thing here is that the comment purports to be from Tim Sumner, who runs a website that asks to be taken seriously. I hope he was drunk, or something.

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29 comments

Here’s another recent case of tenure-denial causes professor to act irrationally and in a (possibly) violent manner.

I’m not sure about the Bishop case but in the case above, the guy never received an evaluation pointing towards the possibility of tenure being denied. He’s got a great legal case. I wonder if Bishop’s annual evaluations were candid enough so that she knew where and how to improve her status before it came to this. There’s a lesson here for those of us who work on peer committees: it doesn’t pay to be less than honest about performance in the years before tenure.

But its a catch-22: if you honestly point out deficiencies, the Dean or Provost might latch on to the less-than-stellar review to get rid of both the specific professor and the Department’s tenure line. This has happened on my campus more than once.

But the Bishop case seems to raise other questions in my mind, such as:
1. Why do so many people with either diagnosable mental illnesses or social and/or personality deficits go into academia?

2. Why did the Police in Massachusetts not take the case seriously when she shot and murdered her brother there many years ago? Could gender and class have played a role?

I was trying to collect my thoughts about the incident, but you’ve said it all much better than I could have. (particularly your third sentence.) My own graduate school experience was horrible, and I know of one suicide and several attempted suicides following unsuccessful dissertation defenses. The struggle for tenure looked so awful that I headed for the federal government after graduation, without ever applying for a tenure track position.

Does academia attract people with mental health issues, or does it cause them through intense pressure, isolation, and distorted priorities? I know that, 20 years later, I still wake up every morning happy to be out of grad school.

Her research looked good on paper, though I’m not a biologist and I don’t know UA-H’s tenure standards. Her rate my professor ratings were ok, not great but not terrible. This makes me wonder if “collegiality” was a factor, and that’s certainly consistent with what acquaintances said about her when talking to reporters, much of which seems like code for “crazyperson.”

Tenure denials have this extra twist: you can get rejected by your institution while still having a semester or a year left on your contract because of the oddities of the academic calendar. So the denied candidate is still around all those people who collectively fired him. And denied candidates can often see all the paperwork, including internal votes and letters. Not just awkward, but really stressful and difficult. (Bishop was denied last year, and her appeal was rejected on Friday– she had a while to stew.)

Rebecca, my own pet theory is that academics are weird because
(1) usually, smart weird people want to go to grad school in the first place;
(2) grad school is a pressure cooker that makes people weirder;
(3) the people who flourish there are people who can be ocd-ish enough to focus on work to an unhealthy degree;
(4) the job market is also crazy-making;
(5) the tenure track is another strange experience;
(6) the tenure process is a nail-biter;
(7) then whoever’s left has near-complete autonomy and the freedom to be weird.

And so at every stage, the people get a little stranger both because of the selection pressures and the experience.

If academics generally trend liberal, as is so often (and I think, rightly) argued, it would follow that they’d be among the least likely to own guns. Since most “go postal” moments are crimes of intense emotion, my money would go toward believing they might be unstable and passionate like a lot of folk, but would find the moment had passed before they could get their hands on a weapon. And, temperamentally, they’d just be more likely to let loose with a hot stream of erudite invective: “You dyspeptic, backstabbing rapscallion, you should be impaled, defenestrated, and subjected to an auto de fe. I hope your memory becomes the special province of the least objectivist narrators this side of Paul de Man. May your so-called library (snort!) be eaten by worms!”

Seriously, this gal seems to have had a few things going at once: she was arrogant and conceited (apparently), she was rejected by people she felt superior to, she was emotionally a bit off, and she seems to have already had a gun (or guns?) in her possession. If that’s so, it’s a real tragic combination. A lot of academics (though I doubt significantly more than the generality, if at all) fit the first three categories, but very few the fourth.

The Reynolds quote amuses me. Not just because of the very tired “if it happened to X, where X is a put-upon white guy, the media would respond” mantra, but because of his willingness to take ratemyprofessors at face value.

Given that three people are dead, three others wounded, and seven families will be living with the aftermath of this forever, the “Amy Bishop thing” seems a little minimalistic…granted, Edge is not RYS, but still…

However, is the question really that “so many people with either diagnosable mental illnesses or social and/or personality deficits go into academia”? Or simply that when an work-place shooting takes place in an academic setting, it garners a different level of attention than when it occurs in a factory, or a fast-food restaurant, or a post office?

Is anyone aware of criminological or psychological work that suggests these sort of mass homicides occur more frequently (per capita) in academic work places than non-academic ones? Much less research that suggests that academics, as a demographic group, have a higher ratio of work place shootings (or mental illness) per capita than the labor force in general, controlled for age, educational level, income, etc?

The thing that actually struck me about this incident, along with simply the inherent tragedy, is that a university department meeting is not one of the locations (as military installations in the US were, for example, at least until the Fort Hood incident) where there is not a (at least) perceived history of this sort of mass shooting.

on criminalogical research: i do seem to recall reading about a study commissioned by the post office which showed that postal workers were no more likely to go on shooting sprees than other kinds of workers. this was a defensive response to the prevalence of the phrase “go postal”, which really is a bit unfair to letter-carriers.

if the question is about campuses as crime scenes, then a lot of the issue must be about young men 18-21, right?

I doubt it’s common. One, workplace shootings tend to make the news, especially when those shootings endanger people similar to the reporters (colleges, middle class high schools), so it seems that they’re especially likely to make an impression on someone’s sense of what is possible or likely.

Two, how many hundreds or thousands of people are denied tenure every year? And for almost all of them, this represents the crushing of a fifteen year long endeavor (counting from the start of the PhD program…) This is hardly an epidemic of shootings. Third, women in their forties tend not to be mass murderers.

I’d be really surprised if there turned out to be an academic-related pattern. Not that I’d deny that academic are a quirky bunch, but multiple homicide is a long way from, say, growing one’s facial hair into remarkable patterns.

Yes, I do. Dana asked a question, though it was a rhetorical question. And her point – that a lot of people are denied tenure and don’t kill people, ergo tenure is really not the issue here – is absolutely correct. I just didn’t think it was necessary to exaggerate how many people are denied tenure to make that point. It was probably a bit pedantic for me to even mention it, but this is the internet, after all.

I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like a bad back of the envelope calculation. There’s about 4000 or so institutions of higher learning in the U.S. where You’d only need half of them denying one person tenure a year to reach two thousand, and that number doesn’t strike me as an obvious exaggeration (given that some schools are more likely to tenure than others, some schools aren’t, at some people leave to avoid coming up for tenure, etc.)

It’s a big country with a lot of schools; I’m not committed to the accuracy of that guesstimation but it’s not wholly out of left field.